The day after camping at the trailer palace, J and I (and our friends who went with us) decided to drive to Pioneertown.

Pioneertown is a little place in the middle of almost nowhere that has a restaurant, a post office, a motel, and some buildings that are all straight out of an Old West film. This is not an exaggeration: many of the buildings in the town are stage pieces, built in the 1940s to have a permanent place to film scenes.

The buildings are small, but look functional, and some of them (such as the post office) are real. There are hitching posts for horses (and many people there use their horses for local transportation), and all sorts of odds and ends that add details to the ambiance.

The restaurant was good, and served barbeque and such things, and we enjoyed strolling the dusty streets. Really it was surreal to be walking down something that was sort of a set…. and then not; we could see people’s real houses just off of the main road.

(Photos of Pioneertown in the already-posted album begin here.)